The common meme of GOP is government is spending too much, we don’t need to tax more, we need to cut more.
Knowing the federal budget looks something like this, exactly where to they envision these cuts to come from where they’ll even make a small dent in the deficit?
Social Security?
Medicare?
Defense?
Medicaid?
Unemployment & Welfare?
They like to make it sound like the goverment is blowing trillions on building art museums, recarpeting the oval office, and funding studies on frog legs.
Do any of them propose any real cuts that may actually make a difference?
(I know Ron Paul would slash defense spending but he’s not the norm).
To make the size of cuts we must make, there is nowhere but SS and Medicare. The only way to pay off their government bonds would be to sell off assets, Hoover Dam, TVA, Cape Kennedy, etc.
That’s a good question, and I look forward to hearing the answer if anyone knows what it is.
In the meantime I’ll note that the GOP is the conservative party, and one of the characteristics of conservativism is admiring the good old days and wanting to turn back the clock in some sense, so perhaps they want to reduce government spending to the level it was at around 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. If we were, hypothetically speaking, to do so, where would the cuts occur?
Social Security and Medicare. But they don’t want to say so very loudly, because they’d never win an election if they did.
Don’t forget the EPA.
I have heard the National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio, Department of Education are other ones they want to see killed. Of course flat-out ending those will do little to balance the budget but that doesn’t really concern them.
That’s reactionarism…reactionism? That’s what a reactionary wants. A conservative just wants to preserve the status quo; while they’re not opposed to change, there better be a damn good reason rather than change for the sake of change.
So the 2012 budget for the EPA is Just under 9 billion
The total revenue of the US is currently about 4.46 Trillion
The 2011 deficit is estimated at 1.1 Trillion
These numbers are huge, so lets make a comparison:
You are bringing home an income of $50,000. You used to make more, but hard times have led to less salary for you. This year, you spent 62,000, and had to put $12,000 of your expenses on the old plastic and a line of credit. Including your mortgage, credit cards and line of credit for your work tools, you owe $164,000.
You don’t want to sell your house (assets), and selling your work tools and then renting them back would probably be a poor idea too.
Your wife does not want you to work any overtime, and refuses to get a job. She flatly refuses to discuss it. Last time you tried to broach the subject, she threatened to kill the kids. So increasing your income is out of the question.
Your wife’s solution? Get rid of the air purifier in your house that helps with your asthma. She keeps going on and on and on about how it is a waste of money and who knows if it even works, and really, your asthma does not really exist anyway; it’s just a fraud by your doctor.
Getting rid of it will save you the vast sum of $100.89 towards your yearly deficit of $12,000.
ETA: Just for fun, let’s assume you live in a sketchy neighborhood, and spend a combined total of $6,200 each year on guns, ammo, and your home security system.
Excellent analogy! I think the wife would also cut school supplies for the kids, the retirement savings fund, and cleaning supplies.
Beauty parlor trips, however, are sacred.
Somebody sure needs to say it.
If they could, they’d totally eliminate all of those except for Defense, which they’d increase regardless of what that did to the deficit. Along with all funding for non-military research, the FDA, the EPA and everything else that doesn’t relate to the military, surveillance, law enforcement, and handouts to large corporations & the wealthy. They want a Third World kleptocracy, basically.
Social security, Medicare and Medicaid, mainly. And just to appease Dems, you can throw in defense spending, too.
For more analogy, the budget of the FDA isabout 3.2 billion
So cutting the FDA would be like saving $35 per year buy cutting your subscription to a consumer magazine that tells you what drugs and products are dangerous to your health. Without this magazine, you have no idea if what you’re buying is toxic, or if the medicine you buy even works. But hey! It’s a step towards getting that $12,000/year deficit under control, and the wife keeps nagging you about how useless the magazine is.
The only written proposal I have seen was Cato’s:
And the one Rand Paul wrote:
Campaign for Liberty - Reclaim the Republic. Restore the Constitution. <- see the .pdf? Biiiiggggg .pdf!
You read it? All of it? Didn’t gouge your eyes out? Jay voos goldurn saloot!
Oh, forgot the answer! Waste, fraud and abuse.
I skimmed it when it came out - but please don’t assign a quiz or I will fail.
I just thought that I would post two libertarian (though not conservative) proposals that were made. I wish we would see similar detailed proposals from other perspectives.
The appropriateness of the analogy is staggering, given the alternatives suggested by the anti-FDA folks. I trust it was intentional.
Some of that, more of “that ain’t the Federal Government’s job” for a lot areas (e.g. eliminate Dept of Education except Pell grants) or “we don’t need to do all that” (e.g. closing military bases, getting out of Iraq for Defense).
More analogy, cause this is fun.
Costs to the Government for Food Stamps have been rising,Reaching nearly 75 billion in 2010
So…
The economy that has hit you hard has hit some of your neighbors harder. They are doing really poorly. Your local church has a food bank that some local folks use out of necessity.
In order to save some money, (you do have that $12,000 yearly deficit to trim), your wife is insisting that these food bank folks are lazy, good for nothing slackers who do not deserve your monthly contribution of $70 to the church food bank. So cut them off.
However, the $805 she sends to the old folks home each month? That cannot be touched.
Food stamps is a program that conservatives despise, and rail against in public, but never quite get around to destroying. It is a program that deeply concerns such champions of social equality as Cargil, Archer Daniels Midland, and General Foods. It is also somewhat tangentially involved in the plot of the corn plant for world domination.
All we need do to ensure help for the poor is to make it enormously profitable for those who are not poor. Problem solved.